Thursday, 23 October 2008

Here is a post I wrote nearly two months ago, but which in true Adam style I neglected to publish.

Labour Day weekend has arrived, and the neighbourhood kids will soon be spending their days in class rather than hanging out on our neighbours' porch. And we haven't stopped working on the house. In fact, tomorrow and Monday, we'll be reorganizing all of the furniture—all of it—having lived with our original arrangement now for about three months. But it's all for the best, of course. And it works out that we haven't really decorated or put up shelves and so on—no holes to patch and paint colours to match!

Things now have gone by so quickly that I can't remember the order of events with any accuracy. Yesterday, we had our air ducts cleaned, which is a pleasure our house may never have experienced in the past. So when perhaps 90 years of accumulated dust (in the richest sense) was sucked from our furnace into that big hose, it looked like a shower that might never end, and I'm very happy that we did it, though there was no immediately noticeable difference. I'm pretty certain now that once we start using the furnace again, the heat might actually reach upstairs. Of course, we'll be replacing our 30-year-old furnace before winter, too, so that will probably help.

We've nearly gotten rid of our junk pile in the backyard. It's packed up and ready for pick up. We hope the garbage men will take it all before we receive our new city garbage bin. Anyway, we now have a lawn, of sorts; particularly since Danijela's parents came and hacked away our jungle of grasses and tall weeds (front and back). Amid those, there were hiding mint, Italian parsley and one poppy. And it appears that the 'coons didn't quite get all of our grapes. There are at least ten remaining, and they're actually edible! So we actually have a pretty comfortable backyard area now, where I will certainly barbeque tonight [Oct. 24—I didn't].

Most of the last month, we have spent cleaning our hallway and finishing the installation of two doors, which we bought from ReStore, which is an initiative of Habitat for Humanity. It's an amazing place to find housewares, mostly the big stuff like cabinets, windows, lights, doors, and so on. It's all used, reclaimed from renos, and mostly in great shape. The two doors we bought clearly came from the same house, and they fit the decor of our home perfectly. But fitting old doors to old door frames is finicky business and it took us quite a while to get it right. It involved some jigsawing (the top and bottom of one of the doors), a lot of planing (the edges of the doors and the pieces of wood that we had to use to shrink the frames), some general sawing and plastic wood (to fill the holes for the original vintage locks—which I later discovered we could have simply replaced, because Home Depot carries them, boo!), some chiselling (to fit the new hinges), some drilling (two two-inch holes in each door for the new hardware), and a small amount of cursing (general purpose).